Thursday, July 13, 2006

More Bad B-Movie Kinda Stuff

A body found in north-east London has been identified as that of a banker who was questioned by the FBI about the Enron fraud case.

Police said they were treating the death in Chingford of Neil Coulbeck, who worked for the Royal Bank of Scotland until 2004, as "unexplained".

Do we have that category over here? "Unexplained?"

How about the anthrax deaths from October of '01?

He had been interviewed by the FBI as a potential witness.

Three ex-workers of RBS subsidiary NatWest are being extradited to the US on Thursday to face fraud charges.

*

The fraud case centres on a NatWest transaction under which it sold off part of its Enron unit.

RBS said: "There is no evidence that Mr Coulbeck was involved in the approval of the transaction under investigation.

*

In 2002, US prosecutors issued arrest warrants for the three men (Bermingham, Mulgrew and Darby), accusing them of conspiring to defraud their employers and investors in energy giant Enron, which had collapsed a year earlier.

It is alleged that the three British bankers - Mr Bermingham, Gary Mulgrew and Mr Darby - advised their employer Greenwich NatWest to sell off its stake in an Enron unit at well below its market value.

They then left the bank and purchased a $250,000 (£135,000) stake in the unit - which they sold on at a much higher price, making a profit of $7.3m (£3.9m).